We’re Jammin’

I jam out a lot, especially since I play in a jazz band at school, which often does songs that just have huge solo sections.  But when I jam out with my real band which used to play kinda progressive death metal and now is really lost, we always jammed out to some real blues rock sorta stuff like Rainbow's "Catch the Rainbow" and stuff like that, it always ended up sounding real bluesy because I think the musical genre is clearly the most prone to jamming.  But yes, without a good drummer to constantly change the "feel" of the jam, it tends to get boring like with two guitars and no keyboards or anything, but it's pretty entertaining for a while nonetheless. Instead I like to leave solo sections in songs which sorta concentrate a certain sort of jamming in each song rather than just straight out anything goes kinda stuff which can get out of control.  Though another cover jam that my band does for fun is Paranoid by Black Sabbath, which is just a blast hehe.

Sometimes I think jazz musicians get so bored, they totally forget that they're supposed to be playing music in their search for entertaining themselves. The other day I was at a record store and they were playing some jazz record which was playing "So What" at like 500 BPM, it sounded absolutely ridiculous and 100% un-musical, just sounded like jibber jab, it took me like 2 minutes to even recognize the song.

 

Honestly, jazz is good for jamming, but unless you've got a real good rhythm section and saxophone players and trumpets etc that can REALLY play, it gets boring.  Funner for a guitarist to jam on blues methinks.

Ankaret wrote: Sometimes I think jazz musicians get so bored, they totally forget that they're supposed to be playing music in their search for entertaining themselves. The other day I was at a record store and they were playing some jazz record which was playing "So What" at like 500 BPM, it sounded absolutely ridiculous and 100% un-musical, just sounded like jibber jab, it took me like 2 minutes to even recognize the song.   Honestly, jazz is good for jamming, but unless you've got a real good rhythm section and saxophone players and trumpets etc that can REALLY play, it gets boring.  Funner for a guitarist to jam on blues methinks.

I know what you're talking about... as the sixties wore on, Miles and team kept speeding that tune up, to further challenge themselves. One thing jazz composers never did well was compose pieces that provided enough interesting compositional material to balance the jamming sections. The "head-solo-head" pattern is so tiring! I think thats one of many reasons why jazz artists got interested in the early rock scene and moved into that concept of music and thus gave birth to the fusion movement. I play in my school's jazz combo, and we play pieces from the 60s period non-stop... i'm surprised I don't fall asleep while i'm soloing sometimes... at least i have the freedom to do what I want I guess... it just doesn't keep the interest level up. (I play trombone by the way)

I see what you mean about the head-solo-head thing, but there's plenty with more complex structure (don't ask me what, since I've only really scratched the surface myself, but there really is some )